Rex White’s induction Friday night into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C., represents one of the great comebacks in motorsports history.
In his relatively brief NASCAR career, White ran 233 races. He won 28 of them, to go with 36 poles and the 1960 championship of the series now known as Sprint Cup. From 1958-62, he won more races than any other driver. But just as quickly as he landed on the scene and became a major player he was gone.
In his final Cup race, at Atlanta Motor Speedway in June 1964, White, driving Bud Moore’s Mercury on a part-time basis, was poised to win. He was leading when he made his last pit stop with 27 laps remaining, but the car ran out of gas when the team jacked up the left side to change tires. White eventually returned to the track to finish fifth behind race winner Ned Jarrett.
“I could have won it if I hadn’t run out of gas,” he said. “I had a chance at it.”
Soon, the powers that be decided to put Darel Dieringer in the car, and left White, primarily known as a Chevrolet driver, on the sidelines.
“I had no idea that was my last race,” he said. “But I never got any other offers.”
So White, who divides his time between his home in Fayetteville and his boyhood home in Taylorsville, N.C., spent the 1965 season racing a Sportsman car on the short tracks of the Southeast. He won 20 races and finished second 10 times in 32 starts, but while the performance numbers looked great, the bottom-line numbers weren’t.
“Basically, I was broke,” White said, pointing out as he often does that his $223,511 in career NASCAR earnings are less that that earned by the last-place finisher in a modern Daytona 500. (Martin Truex Jr. earned $292,511 for 43rd place last year.)
So when Bob Maddox offered him a job as service manager at his local Chrysler-Plymouth dealership, White took it. After five years there, he started driving big rigs on the highway, hauling among other things parts of airplanes for Delta Air Lines.
For 25 years, he never returned to the NASCAR tracks where he once was a popular figure among both fans and competitors.
When he went to work driving for Jones Transportation in Forest Park, he never mentioned that he was a champion race driver. “It was about two years before some of the people there figured it out,” he said.
There would be times when people would recognize him on the road, but for the most part he put NASCAR behind him. “I didn’t even keep up with it,” he said.
Once he went to the credential office at AMS to see about passes for some friends. No one there knew him, so he left. The late Neil Bonnett happened up, immediately recognized him and they chatted. After White left, the credential workers asked who the man was. Bonnett explained that he was a former series champion and winner at Atlanta in 1962, but it was too late. White was gone.
Then in 1989, at the urging of friends and co-workers, he attended a dinner in Atlanta honoring past Cup champions and former AMS winners.
Drivers such as Richard Petty and Ned Jarrett seemed genuinely happy to see him again.
White got an annual NASCAR license and began attending races and racing events. He went to Darlington and received the jacket he earned from being inducted into the Stock Car Hall of Fame there. He missed the induction ceremony in 1975. “I was in California on a trip for Delta,” he said.
He was named one of NASCAR’s 50 greatest drivers and was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in Talladega, Ala. Then last year, White, NASCAR’s oldest living champion at age 85, was voted into the NASCAR Hall in Charlotte.
He considers it his greatest triumph.
“It’s at the top of the list,” White said. “I’m getting more publicity, more fan mail and making more appearances than I ever did when I was driving.”
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